Creating a ZFS Storage Pool

The previous example illustrates the simplicity of ZFS. The remainder of this chapter
provides a more complete example, similar to what you would encounter in your
environment. The first tasks are to identify your storage requirements and create a
storage pool. The pool describes the physical characteristics of the storage and must
be created before any file systems are created.

How to Identify Storage Requirements for Your ZFS Storage Pool

Determine available devices for your storage pool.

Before creating a storage pool, you must determine which devices will store your data.
These devices must be disks of at least 128 MB in size,
and they must not be in use by other parts of the operating
system. The devices can be individual slices on a preformatted disk, or they
can be entire disks that ZFS formats as a single large slice.

ZFS supports multiple types of data replication, which determines the types of hardware
failures the pool can withstand. ZFS supports nonredundant (striped) configurations, as well as mirroring
and RAID-Z (a variation on RAID-5).

How to Create a ZFS Storage Pool

This name is used to identify the storage pool when you are using
the zpool and zfs commands. Most systems require only a single pool,
so you can pick any name that you prefer, but it must satisfy
the naming requirements in ZFS Component Naming Requirements.

Create the pool.

For example, the following command creates a mirrored pool that is named tank:

# zpool create tank mirror c1t0d0 c2t0d0

If one or more devices contains another file system or is otherwise in
use, the command cannot create the pool.